Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to distributed systems for the storage and retrieval of encrypted biological specimen data. More specifically, it relates to a system employing blockchains in a secure peer-to-peer (P2P) networks for the storage and retrieval of encrypted data relating to biological specimens and encrypted data associated with the biological specimens.
Description of Related Art
Privacy and trust in healthcare data is of particular concern for patients, medical facilities, governments and pharmaceutical companies. In the course of clinical trials specimens are collected and data about specimens is also created as the results of analyses performed on the specimen and the patient. These highly annotated specimens are an extremely valuable resource for precision medicine, yet they are often locked away (both physically and logically) and rarely used beyond their original use. Often, privacy concerns from the patients, the medical and legal community, pharmaceutical companies, and other parties results in patients opting out of trials, limiting the use of their data and other unused data and specimens of high value. In addition, the rich data from these specimens is also locked away in siloed pharmaceutical company databases and electronic medical systems, which precludes analysis of this data through modern data analysis techniques such as data mining or crowdsourcing.
Bitcoin is an on-line cryptographic based, decentralized currency network that employs a database technology known as blockchain. Blockchain technology is the backbone of the bitcoin network and provides a tamper-proof data structure, providing a shared public ledger open to all users with access to the bitcoin network.
A blockchain is a distributed database that is secured by complex cryptography and is publically viewable, in a P2P network. Any type of data may be stored semi-publically in a blockchain. Data stored in a blockchain is signed by the user uploading the data into the blockchain. Anyone with access to the blockchain may verify that data has been uploaded by a certain user, but only the user who uploaded the data owns a private key that grants access to the data. Thus, the blockchain behaves like a database with a public header—some information is available publicly, but a specific key is required to obtain additional data from the blockchain.
The benefits of a blockchain are that it can store any type of data and keep it highly secure through a combination of encryption and private key access, but also provide limited public access to the data. These benefits make blockchains an ideal solution for storing highly sensitive data that must be shared.